Google Search Insights – a great tool from google that can give you detailed information on what people in different areas are searching for. Find out what the popular search terms are, where they are more popular, etc.
Category: Google
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GrandCentral – One Ring to rule them ALL?
Has Google gone too far with the purchase of GrandCentral? “One number that rings all your phones” (and in the darkness binds them?) There are already great privacy concerns with google. This new acquisition I am SURE will lead to more worries. The idea with grandcentral is that you have a unified inbox for voicemail. All of your voicemail can be accessed in one place. You can get voicemail notifications via sms or email. You can screen calls it looks like, you can have incoming calls ring specific phones depending on who’s calling… it sounds like there are some interesting features including (of course) managing it all online. The service is currently in beta and is taking “reservations” for YOUR unified phone number.
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Strange Google Calendar Glitch with Multiple Calendars
I use Google Calendar for most everything I do. Since I have a number of different jobs I have a tendency to break things down into individual calendars. So I have my personal calendar events, my computer work, my piano schedule, Church. Each of these are in separate calendars within my Google Calendar account. So, usually when I go to add an item I get a drop down box in the dialog box that let’s me choose which calendar to put the task in.
Today that vanished.
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Google Reader cache-ing feed behavior
In the last couple months I’ve been “farming out” several domains from the averyjparker.com site. I previously hosted my South Carolina Genealogy, North Carolina Genealogy and Online Radio TV sites all in the same virtual server as averyjparker.com. Well, I’ve noticed some strange behavior from Google Reader as a result…. read on.
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Great tip for Dealing with SPAM email
In reading over at the Gmail Blog, I came across this suggestion to try with Gmail. The idea is, let’s say your address is johndoe@gmail.com Okay, next time you sign up for a mailing list, or need a free website login, use johndoe+freelogin@gmail.com or johndoe+spam@gmail.com or any other unique identifier (something you’ll be able to track.) The idea is this… gmail ignores anything after a + in the address and the mail will still get to your inbox, but… here comes the cool part.
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Another set of interesting tools for investigating how google sees your sites.
There is a nice collection of tools at www.iwebtool.com, specifically at http://www.iwebtool.com/tools/. It’s more than just how google sees your site, there are tools that show how your page ranks at alexa, etc.
http://www.iwebtool.com/visual_pagerank for instance is the Visual Pagerank tool and http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_prediction is the google pagerank prediction tool.
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Google sign in’s out of order?
Is it just me or does it seem like about half of google sign in pages are out of order. (GMail seems ok) Adwords, Analytics, and Adsense all refuse to bring up the login box. (Main page for adwords and analytics loads, but the iframe that houses the login doesn’t.) It’s about 11:20AM EST now and this has been the case for the last hour or two. I haven’t seen any mention yet on official google blogs. (Calendar seems unresponsive for me right now too.)
Ok – I think it may have been just me, maybe leaving firefox open for 5 days at a time with 29 tabs causes funky things like that to happen. *(Tested on the same machine with another browser and the login came up, si I killed and restarted firefox and all is well.)
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Time, value, ROI, Google and this site…. Googlebummed
This is a fairly significant “state of this site” type post and well… if you’re a usual visitor you might want to read/skim this one. It’s been about 15 months or so since the last big redesign of this site and as some long time lurkers may know, the updates were FEW and far between before moving to WordPress and this new layout. I mean, a year or so between updates was not uncommon. In the last year+ I’ve had a few spans where a month or so has gone by without posting, but in many cases I’ve been posting multiple (in other cases MANY MANY) posts in a single day.
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Roll your own search engine… sort of…
Several blog posts have heralded the arrival of Google’s newest toy, a custom search engine setup… sort of Through Google Coop you can design a search engine that only covers the sites you want it to cover (or favor, it can search the web and just be biased towards the sites you prefer.) Of course, this relies on googles existing index, so if a site has not been crawled and indexed by the googlebot, you seem to be out of luck. I’ve tried a test at http://www.southcarolinagenealogy.org/search for my North and South Carolina genealogy sites…. a merged search between the two would be handy…
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Google Sitemaps adds more tools
I just re-visited sitemaps last night to take a look at some of the new tools they’ve rolled out. Google announced that they were adding a few features in the last couple days. Crawl statistics (and control over slow/normal/fast crawl speed) is one of the additions, also it’s possible to tag images for better searching and the number of URL’s read from a sitemap. Nice, I’d LOVE to see them add the pagerank (in google toolbar form) on the page that they show the report of the page with the highest pagerank for the month. By the way, the faster crawl rate is not available for all sites, only if google determines that crawl rate MAY be a factor in getting your pages indexed. The change to faster lasts for 3 months. (Faster crawl rate could put a higher load on your server.) I found that sites with less than 20 pages (give or take) didn’t have the faster crawl option, bigger sites (20+) did have the option. (Rough estimate.)